I think the implied full question was, "Why does NASA even have press releases next to the actual research they publish, and why those releases occupy higher spots in search results than the research?".
The answer is still the same. Press releases are accessible to the general public and have a wider appeal than research papers, so they appear higher in the search ranking. I'm not sure why the author of the article thinks only people capable of reading and understanding the consequences of a research paper are interested in reports from NASA.
Also, in case anyone didn't realize, press releases are what the press use to write popular articles. Hence the term. Journalists generally don't read scientific papers.
what' stopping them from publishing the executive summary or abstract as a generic non-optimized, non-gamified SEO'd document? that's what universities and research organizations did for the first 30+ years of the internet...